Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Guess which country contains eco-criminals that can afford to use fossil fuels, and which country contains nature-lovers who are dependent on natural renewable organic biomass for energy? (99% of Haiti’s forests have been decimated, not for building materials, but for cooking fuel.)

WHEN the New York Times hired climate ‘Lukewarmer’ Bret Stephens as a contributing columnist in late April 2017, a collective cry of treasonous rage was heard throughout the deep-green environmental community. How dare anyone question whether we should accept absolutely every pronouncement of imminent eco-doom at face value?!

A snippet of the enraged reporting at the time from the usual suspects…

Climate Scientists Cancelling Their New York Times Subscription Over Hiring of Climate Denialist Bret Stephens

By Graham Readfearn • Thursday, April 27, 2017 – 16:59

A New York Times defence of its hiring of a climate science denialist as a leading columnist is pushing high-profile climate scientists to cancel their subscriptions.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, is the latest scientist to write publicly to the New York Times detailing his reasons for cancelling their subscriptions.

Stephens wrote several columns while at the WSJ disparaging climate science and climate scientists, which he has collectively described as a “religion” while claiming rising temeperatures may be natural.

The NYT has been defending its decision publicly, saying that “millions of people” agree with Stephens on climate science and just because their readers don’t like his opinions, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be heard.

The New York Times took a lot of heat for hiring Bret Stephens, a former opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, as its newest columnist. There was a lot to criticize. In his storied tenure on some of the most radically conservative pages in print journalism, Stephens accused Arabs of suffering a “disease of the mind,” railed against the Black Lives Matter movement and dismissed the rise of campus rape as an “imaginary enemy.”

But Stephens’ views on climate change ― namely that the jury is still out on whether burning fossil fuels is the chief cause ― drew the widest condemnation. ThinkProgress admonished the Gray Lady for hiring an “extreme climate denier,” and famed climatologist Michael Mann backed them up in the critique. DeSmog Blog, a site whose tagline reads “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science,” reported on a letter from climate scientists who are canceling their subscriptions to the newspaper over its latest hire. In These Times’ headline pointedly asked: “Why the Hell did the New York Times just hire a climate denier?”

STEPEHENS has recently written another reasoned column in the Times that has no doubt sent the eco-freaks into another predictable tailspin!

IN the Feb 8 opinion piece, “Apocalypse Not“, Stephens argues that a healthy environment is dependent on a healthy economy first, namely a capitalist one.

“The foolish idea that capitalism is the enemy of the environment misses the point that environmentalism is itself a luxury that few poor countries can adequately afford. If you doubt this, contrast the air and water quality in New York City with that of any similar-sized city in the developing world.”

A view not shared by radical environmental groups who, including the UN, believe that in order to “save the planet” we must fundamentally change the current economic development model. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) herself admitted that the goal of environmentalists is to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” – Christiana Figueres Brussels February, 2015

Apocalypse Not

In 1919, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines offered a dire warning for the future. “Within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline.”

Nearly a century later, in July 2010, The Guardian ran a story with an ominous headline: “Lloyd’s adds its voice to dire ‘peak oil’ warnings.” Citing a report by the storied London insurer, the newspaper warned that businesses were “underestimating catastrophic consequences of declining oil,” including oil at $200 a barrel by 2013, a global supply crunch, and overall “economic chaos.”

I thought of these predictions on seeing the recent news that the United States is on the eve of breaking a 47-year production record by lifting more than 10 million barrels of crude a day. That’s roughly twice what the U.S. produced just a decade ago, and may even put us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia and even Russia as the world’s leading oil producer. As for global production, it rose by some 11 percent just since the Lloyd’s report, and by almost 200 percent since 1965.

Call it yet another case of Apocalypse Not.

—–

“In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem,” Mann writes. “Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from than earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction.”

In our own day, people like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have made careers saying more or less the same thing. This is a world where the clock is permanently set at two minutes to midnight, and where only a radical transformation of modern society (usually combining dramatic changes in personal behavior along with a heavy dose of state intervention) can save us.

—–

The foolish idea that capitalism is the enemy of the environment misses the point that environmentalism is itself a luxury that few poor countries can adequately afford. If you doubt this, contrast the air and water quality in New York City with that of any similar-sized city in the developing world.

I fall in the Borlaugian camp. That’s worth noting because one of the more tedious criticisms by the environmental left is that people like me “don’t care about the environment.” But imputing bad faith, stupidity or greed is always a lousy argument. Even conservatives want their children to breathe.

—–

Borlaugians are environmentalists, too. They simply think the road to salvation lies not through making do with less, but rather through innovation and the conditions in which innovation tends to flourish, greater affluence and individual freedom most of all.

—–

If environmental alarmists ever wonder why more people haven’t come around to their way of thinking, it isn’t because people like me occasionally voice doubts in newspaper op-eds. It’s because too many past predictions of imminent disaster didn’t come to pass.

Institutionalised data bias is a handy default for radical-left eco-catastrophists who have a tendency to extract worst-case scenarios from every weather event. | THE AUSTRALIAN

GLOBAL warming alarmists want to change us, they want to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences. They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate or the environment. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate.

FORMER head of Deutsche Bank, the ABC and ASX, Maurice Newman, writes another insightful piece in todays Australian maintaining that “it’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with extinction but blind ideology dressed up as science.”

*

The inconvenient truth is that catastrophists are wrong

It should come as a great relief to know the freezing temperatures recently experienced in the northern hemisphere do not signal an end to global warming.

Imagine if mankind’s increasingly costly attempts to arrest CO2 emissions were unnecessary. That the misallocation of productive resources, prolonging the misery of the world’s most vulnerable people, was nothing more than a cynical ideological exercise?

Hopefully, those global warming doubters in Florida watching frozen iguanas falling stiff from the trees now know that while they were freezing, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, little old Penrith in Sydney, Australia, was the warmest spot on the planet, recording its highest temperature ever, having “broken the all-time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney metropolitan area”.

Well, perhaps in all that excitement the bureau can be forgiven for overlooking the fact Penrith Lakes started recording temperatures only in 1995 and for missing a much higher temperature recorded in nearby Richmond in 1939. But they were right. It was hot.

In a hurried piece in Fairfax publications, the Climate Council of Australia’s Will Steffen throws hot water on any misconceptions that may have been drawn from abnormal snowfalls in Britain, Switzerland and Japan, the record-breaking cold snap in Canada and the US, and the expansion of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

He says: “Terms like ‘global warming’ and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is ‘climate disruption’, which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.” So fire and ice, it’s to be expected.

Of course you won’t be surprised to learn Steffen claims “the climate disruption we are increasingly experiencing is not natural. It is caused by the heat-trapping gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of coal, oil and gas.”

On the day Steffen’s opinion piece appeared, this newspaper republished Matt Ridley’s article in The Times claiming “the Earth is very slowly slipping back into a proper ice age”. This confirms research by Henrik Svensmark, Australia’s David Evans and others, who correlated low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays), with a cooling climate.

Indeed, last year scientists submitted 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity.

Steffen wasn’t among them. He says: “Whole ecosystems are succumbing to (human-induced) climate disruption. In 2016 unusually dry and hot conditions triggered massive fires in Tasmania’s World Heritage forests, while ocean circulation patterns have moved ­unprecedented underwater heatwaves around the world, driving the tragic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.’’

Yet the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt, dismisses many of the claims that he says “misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

Peter Ridd from James Cook University goes further, saying: “We can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. The science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated, and this is a great shame.”

Steffen’s work could fit this description. He spends much time pushing eco-catastrophism. “Climate disruption” he says “brings growing risks of large-scale migration and conflict as people, particularly the most vulnerable, are forced to deal with increasingly difficult conditions where they live. Some security analysts warn that climate disruption will dwarf terrorism and other conventional threats if present trends continue or worsen.

“Had enough of climate disruption? Then let’s leave our 20th-century thinking behind and get on with the job of rapidly building innovative, clever, carbon-neutral 21st-century societies.”

But Ridley questions the influence of carbon dioxide. He reminds us that: “In 1895 the Swede, Svante Arrhenius, one of the scientists who first championed the greenhouse theory, suggested that the ice retreated because carbon dioxide levels rose, and advanced because they fell. If this was true, then industrial emissions could head off the next ice age. There is indeed a correlation in the ice cores between temperature and carbon dioxide, but inconveniently it is the wrong way round: carbon dioxide follows rather than leads temperature downward when the ice returns.”

But where would manmade global warming “science” be if it relied on just facts? For decades, climate science has been plagued by scandals, deceit and the confessions of whistleblowers.

Penrith’s hyped recording is not new. Scientist and long-time BOM critic Jennifer Marohasy has been calling for an audit and urging Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg “to inform the World Meteorological Organisation that the temperatures recorded by our bureau are not consistent with calibration, nor any international standard”, and, to “direct the bureau to desist from announcing new record hot days”.

Still, institutionalised data bias is a handy default for radical-left eco-catastrophists who have a tendency to extract worst-case scenarios from every weather event.

But despite their best efforts, in the public’s eyes their story is wearing thin. There have been too many false predictions and unwarranted alarmism. People are wising up to the reality that climate science has become an unfalsifiable ideology and resent having their moral conscience questioned should they disagree.

If Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age, it will be literally cold comfort, not to mention lethal, to keep passing it off as climate disruption.

To survive such an event, our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given today’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels.

It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with extinction but blind ideology dressed up as science.

RATHER telling when the likes of the Guardian lambasts China’s absurd move to ramp up coal-fired power to ensure the wellbeing of their most vulnerable, demonising “dirty” (lifesaving) coal without a single mention of unreliables to stop the supposed rot. Cowards.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has urged coal miners to increase high-grade coal supplies to ensure heating fuel for winter, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said in a statement on Tuesday.

The statement comes after the central government scaled back its plan earlier this month to convert northern cities to natural gas from coal for heating, because provinces across China had warned of gas shortages.

The NDRC asked miners to put more high-grade coal projects into operation “as soon as possible”.

Coal-fired power plants are also encouraged to increase their thermal coal stockpiles and upgrade their equipment to reduce emissions.

THAT ye-olde cliché again – “Do as I say, not as I do!” And, what is wrong with Skype to save on those evil plant food CO2 emissions? Worst case scenario, the climate obsessed mainstream media does a years worth of climate industry lobbying in a single day, for free!

Image credit: emeraldmedia.co.ukAnother example of how the ‘climate industry’ is out of control. 25,000 attendees sounds more like a sports event.

The thousands who flocked to Germany for the United Nations climate summit will end up, rather ironically, emitting thousands of tons of the very greenhouse gases attendees want to regulate, writes Michael Bastasch at The Daily Caller.

The U.N. admits the “lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions” associated with their latest climate summit, and up to 25,000 people are expected to attend the U.N. summit in Bonn, which kicked off Monday.

While the COP23 climate conference is going on in Bon this week, there has been renewed wailing and gnashing of teeth over President Trump’s withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord this past summer. There are lots of reasons why the US doesn’t need to participate, but looking at this one graph, it becomes clear that other countries aren’t leading the way, not one bit. The USA leads by a large margin.

This is the graph climate alarmists and tax revenue trough feeders don’t want you to see:

“The destruction of nature by the land-hungry wind and biogas industries is the opposite of what the environmental movement used to fight for: just as the communists made workers unfree and poor, the Greens have destroyed our landscapes and killed millions of birds and bats.” Michael Miersch, German Wildlife Foundation

The Energiewende is the transition by Germany to a low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply. The new system will rely heavily on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy demand management.

BASIC research into each of the virtues ascribed by Energiewende shows that not one of the fundamental ‘energy transition’ goals have been realised. In fact, the opposite in all cases has been stunningly achieved:

German emissions increased in 2016 for a second year in a row as a result of the country closing one of its nuclear plants and replacing it with coal and natural gas, a new Environmental Progress analysis finds.

German emissions would have declined had it not closed a nuclear plant and replaced it with coal and natural gas.

Not only did new solar and wind not make up for the lost nuclear, the percentage of time during 2016 that solar and wind produced electricity declined dramatically.

Germany added a whopping 10 percent more wind turbine capacity and 2.5 percent more solar panel capacity between 2015 and 2016, but generated less than one percent more electricity from wind and generated one percent less electricity from solar.

The reason is because Germany had significantly less sunshine and wind in 2016 than 2015.

Today the task has become a challenging balancing act. According to Manager Magazin, facility manager Volker Weinreich says “we have to intervene more often than ever to keep the power grid stable. We are getting closer and closer to the limit.”

The reason for the grid instability: the growing amount of erratic renewable energy being fed in, foremost wind and sun. Manager Magazin writes that there are always four workers monitoring the frequency at the Tennet control center, just outside Hannover, making sure that it stays near 50 Hz. Too much instability would mean a the “worst imaginable disaster: grid collapse and blackout“.

Weinreich describes how on stormy days wind parks are forced to shut down to keep the grid from frying. And the more wind turbines that come online, the more often wind parks need to be shut down. This makes them even more inefficient.

Not only do wind and solar feed in their power on a part-time basis, but now so do the conventional power plants as well — all according to the whims of the weather. An d too often they run at levels well below peak efficiency. The costs of all the inefficiencies get passed on to the consumers. Tens of thousands have been forced into “energy poverty”.

1400 interventionsWeinreich reports that the grid is so unstable that in 2015 it was necessary for Tennet to intervene some 1400 times. In the old conventional power days, it used to be only “a few times a year“.

Germany’s Energiewende has only succeeded in massively elevating Germany’s consumer power prices, making its power almost twice as expensive as power in neighboring France, which relies heavily on nuclear. While France’s power is half the cost, the country also emits far less CO2 from electricity production.

THE correlation between skyrocketing power prices and high roll-outs of unreliable-energy by country is stark:

GERMANY’S green energy transition is destroying vast swathes of nature, agricultural lands and forests. In the name of climate policy, rare birds and endangered species are being killed while much of the countryside is transformed into industrial parks.

Michael Miersch from the Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung recently gave a talk in the House of Lords about renewable energy’s devastating impact on wildlife and the environment in Germany and other parts of the world.

About the author Michael Miersch is director of Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung (German Wildlife Foundation), a non-profit organisation devoted the protection of wildlife in Gemany. He is a professional journalist who worked for more than three decades for national newpapers, magazines and TV-stations, amongst others Die Welt, Die Zeit and WDR (public TV). He has written several books about nature, science and politics, some of which have become bestsellers. This paper is based on a speech given on 24 October 2017 in the House of Lords.

(Climatism bolds and selected highlights from report)

Are Wind Power and Biofuels Really Green? How Germany’s ‘Energy Transition’ is destroying wildlife and forests Michael Miersch

It is one hundred years since the Russian Revolution, known officially in communist countries as ‘The Great Socialist October Revolution’. The one time I visited East Germany, a friend there said, ‘the name contains four lies’.

First, it wasn’t great. It was a coup, led by Leon Trotsky, that took place at night, so that most inhabitants of St Petersburg didn’t even notice.

Second, it wasn’t socialist, at least not in the sense that it brought freedom and prosperity to the working class.

Third, it wasn’t a revolution, but instead – as I said – a night-time coup by an armed militia, which occupied strategically important buildings in St Petersburg. And fourth, it didn’t happen in October but, according to the Gregorian calendar, in November.

Today, whenever I hear the phrase ‘green energy’, I think of this old joke. In Germany, electricity from wind power and biogas is called ‘eco-power’, ‘bio-power’ or even ‘natural electricity’. These names contain many lies too, and I would like to tell you about them.

First though, there is another parallel between green energy and the Russian Revolution. The communists promised the workers everything and gave them nothing. Anyone who was not ideologically blind could see that the workers in western capitalist countries were much better off than their counterparts in communist eastern Europe. The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greens promised to save nature. They wanted to be the protectors of forests, birds and rivers. But their policies have led to the most widespread destruction of nature in Germany since the Second World War. No industry consumes as much land as the generation of ‘natural electricity’.

Without the pressure from the Greens and their friends in the environmental NGOs, the German governments of chancellors Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel would not have pushed the expansion of wind power, bioenergy and solar energy as much as they did. As our former Minister of Agriculture from the Green Party, Renate Künast, once said: ‘Farmers will be the oil barons of the future!’ She and her party pushed for massive subsidies for growing energy crops. The destruction of nature by the land-hungry wind and biogas industries is the opposite of what the environmental movement used to fight for: just as the communists made workers unfree and poor, the Greens have destroyed our landscapes and killed millions of birds and bats.

…

Wind power lobbyists say the numbers are small compared to the millions of birds that collide with windows, cars, power lines and other obstacles. But this is a fallacy, because the argument ignores which species are affected. If ten city pigeons fly into windows or cars, it has no effect on the population of pigeons. But when a breeding red kite is chopped up by a rotor blade, it represents a significant loss for the species in the region.

If one red kite is caught in a rotor every eight years, then the 28,000 turbines in existence at present will kill 3500 birds. In a total population of only 15,000 breeding pairs in Germany, that’s a dramatic loss. According to a 2013 study commissioned by the Brandenburg State Environment Office, rotor blades killed about 300 red kites each year in this one state alone.

If the German climate protection plan is implemented as planned and the number of turbines is doubled, the red kite could soon be extinct in Germany. The plan would mean one turbine every 2.7 km on average all over Germany, each one 200 m tall, without regard for landscapes, lakes, mountains, forests or cities.

The PROGRESS study showed that even a widespread raptor like the common buzzard would be threatened if wind power is expanded as planned. Birds that aren’t killed by the rotor blades are often driven away. One of these wind power refugees is the black stork, a very shy forest bird. When 170 turbines were installed in the Vogelsberg region in the state of Hesse, nine of the 14 pairs of black storks in the region simply disappeared.

If the argument that windows and other obstacles kill even more birds is very misleading, when it comes to bats the argument is completely wrong. Since bats use ultrasound to navigate, they almost never collide with any barriers. They can even fly through spinning rotor blades without getting hit. But even so, they fall dead from the sky. The cause is barotrauma: Their lungs burst because of the pressure drop behind the rotors. This happens to about 240,000 bats each year.

The actual number is probably much higher, because they often fly a little longer before they die and their little cadavers are eaten. Whenever there was a construction project in Germany such as a motorway, bridge, airport, office park or residential building, the presence of a bat colony could hold up the project in the courts for years, or prevent it altogether.

Yet when the wind industry kills masses of these animals, there is no such outrage. The supporters of the German energy transition brush aside all collateral damage to the environment, such as dead bats, with the argument that global climate disaster must be prevented.

SUCH an important and pivotal (quick) read that needs to be spread far and wide, over and over and over again…

Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities.Voltaire

Climate Realism Against Alarmism

A Realist Side of the Climate Debate. CO2 is a product of human breath and is plant food, NOT a pollutant.

CLIMATE alarmism is a gigantic fraud: it only survives by suppressing dissent and by spending tens of billions of dollars of public money every year on pseudo-scientific propaganda. Climate pseudo-science is wrong on physics, biology, meteorology, mathematics, computer sciences, and almost everything else. And even if the “climate science” were perfectly correct, climate alarmism politics would still be a tyranny and betrayal. Alarmists demand that the US and other Western countries unilaterally decrease their carbon dioxide emissions, while allowing unlimited increase to China and all other countries, which already emit more than 70% of carbon dioxide and almost 100% of other infrared-absorbing gases and soot.How could this happen? Carbon dioxide is exhaled by humans with each breath. How could the idea to call it a “pollutant” and to regulate its “emissions” get such traction in our society? How could a mad suicidal cult and its preachers obtain so much power in the academia and media, and become a cornerstone of the Democrats’ political platform, in the 21st century?

Many factors were in play.

This takeover did not happen overnight, but took some 30-40 years.

Climate alarmism was born and acquired power abroad. It was led by a bunch of non-governmental organizations of the environmentalist and “global governance” persuasion, acting in cahoots with certain United Nations agencies. It infiltrated the US through American branches of foreign NGOs and their fellow travelers, such as NRDC and EDF. Climate alarmism made a huge leap in 1993, when its fanatical disciple Al Gore became the Vice President. Nevertheless, climate alarmism has always been and remains an essentially foreign phenomenon.For example, the infamous Congressional testimony delivered by Dr. James Hansen in 1988, on invitation from Senator Wirth, was instigated by foreign enviros and diplomats in the run-up to the Toronto conference that happened a few weeks later. The climate dogma had been developing largely in lawless UN agencies and unaccountable transnational organizations, often using them as an extra-territorial operational base when national public demanded answers about its mischief.

There is indeed a strong consensus among foreign governments in support of climate alarmism. This consensus has nothing to do with the science. Many governments are promised “reparations” from the United States for alleged harm; other countries expect to benefit from the damage to North American oil & gas exploration inflicted by climate alarmism; and another group of countries enjoys immunity from limitations that climate treaties impose on Europe and North America and receive fringe benefits in the form of outsourced manufacturing and/or preferential trade terms. Finally, many European countries are ruled by coalitions including influential Green Parties, and the rest are too small to resist.

Over the last 8-10 years, climate alarmism has achieved its huge scale by spending tens of billions of dollars on its own public relations, including payments to public relations firms, pseudo-scientists, corrupt academics, university administrators, journalists, and media outlets. It has also created its own institutions with scientific-sounding names and taken over formerly highly-regarded organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences. Climate alarmism continues to demand more and more money, and spends most of it on self-promotion and intimidating its opponents.

The leaders and pseudo-scientists of climate alarmism are driven by many motives. Fear of just punishment is quickly becoming the leading motive, as it should be. Their crimes start with tax evasion, theft of hundreds of billions of dollars, inflicting economic damage on the order of trillions of dollars, include an attempt to murder millions of Americans by shutting down the national energy infrastructure, and possibly include high treason. It is likely that they hide the truth even from their nominal party leaders – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. That makes the current situation even more dangerous and unpredictable.

The foreign interference, money, and some confusion about the subject matter were not the only factors in the meteoric rise of climate alarmism. Since the late 1980s, the global warming agenda has been accepted by the left as “their cause,” and received unconditional support. The majority of the scientists leaned left, and many of them accepted the alarmist claims (which were much more reasonable then than today) of the environmentalists and general media without suspicion. These scientists also bore old prejudices against conservatives, to whom they attributed all kinds of anti-scientific leanings. Although these prejudices provided enough breeding ground for alarmism, the scientific community successfully resisted climate alarmism in 1990’s. The Oregon Petition, signed by more than 30,000 scientists and other professionals knowledgeable in sciences, is just one example.

In 2001, even the International Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that carbon dioxide emissions did not cause harmful climate change. It reacted to this “discovery” by removing the word “anthropogenic” from its definition of “climate change.” That did not stop climate alarmism from gaining momentum. Instead, climate alarmism finally parted ways with science, and declared its dogma to be the undisputed truth.

Scientifically illiterate Al Gore was responsible for the science in the Clinton–Gore administration from 1993-2001. He evaluated scientists according to their agreement with his views on global warming. Not surprisingly, his appointments and budget decisions had effect of deadly poison, administered to the American scientific enterprise. (To tell the truth, it was not all Al Gore’s fault. The scientific enterprise came under fire from many directions, from the academic “social constructivism” theory to “diversity” politics.) The scientific institutions, already leaning left before Al Gore, just fell to the left after his reign.

George W. Bush was too naïve to fight cunning enviros on the government payroll posing as scientists, and was allowed too little time for that anyway. Concerned with maintaining national unity in the aftermath of the enemy attack on 9/11, he appointed Democrat John Marburger as his scientific advisor (Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy). Marburger let government-financed scientific institutions slide further down and to the left, but his appointment did not save Bush from the usual accusations of “manipulating science for political purposes,” “censoring scientific results,” and “silencing the science,” all slogans shouted by the Union of Con Scientists and the rest of the attack pack.

In 1997, the US Senate rejected the Kyoto pact, instigated by climate alarmism, by a 95–0 vote. The main reason was its discriminatory terms against the US. But these terms, demanding unilateral emission cuts by the US and few other countries, were more like an insult added to an injury. The injury was the corruption of the science by environmentalist quackery, of which the global warming catastrophism was just the latest example. This vote proved to be a palliative treatment. Many politically active leftist scientists, including distinguished ones, remained committed to the totalitarian ideals, wanted Congress to accept their beliefs as the science, and called for Congress to “restore science to its appropriate place in government.“ But the First Amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The leftist scientists either did not understand the First Amendment, decided that it applied only to religion of the “ordinary folk” and not to them, or were egged on by their comrades whose “science” needed “a place in the government” because it took place neither in nature nor in the lab. When the Senate passed a resolution not addressing alarmist beliefs directly, these scientists probably concluded that the Senators did not have scientific arguments against the alarmist beliefs, and acted out of some ulterior political motives. And they accepted the alarmist claims (which were much more moderate then than today) as real science, and opposition to them as politically or financially motivated. Since many of these scientists were quite distinguished and sincere in their ignorance and hubris, their opinion carried much weight with their colleagues.

The lawless nature of the IPCC and other UN agencies allowed climate alarmists to pull off a trick which would be impossible in any national forum. It was like the “telephone” game played by kids. Scientists at the bottom of the IPCC structure were saying one thing, while Greenpeace and its accomplices at the top of the IPCC structure were telling the public something entirely different, and invoking the authority of the scientists. When elected officials disagreed with the Greenpeace allegations, many legitimate scientists thought that the politicians misunderstood the science, and sharply criticized them. The leftist media was only too happy to amplify such criticism.One example is the play on the definition of “climate change.” If climate change is understood as “dangerous anthropogenic global warming,” as in the UN Framework Agreement on Climate Change, then climate change does not happen. If climate change is defined to include natural climate variations, according to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), then it happens and has been happening for billions of years, but is not alarming. And there are dozens or hundreds of mutually incompatible definitions of climate change, produced by climate alarmists and by scientists trying to get crumbs from the alarmist table.

The extreme left apparently took over the Democratic Party in 2002-2005. The DNC started to court the foreign vote openly. Internet made that courting easy and convenient. Democrat Congresspersons welcomed foreign “observers” at the US elections. Al Gore started a hedge fund called Generation Investment Management in the UK, and founded an exchange to trade hot air (voluntary carbon credits). Gore and his minions publicly fantasized that the hot air would become the hottest commodity of the 21st century, and prepped themselves to become multi-billionaires. Unfortunately, they did not stop at fantasizing, but attracted some serious money, and put it at work to scare us into buying those carbon credits. In 2006, following Al Gore’s fraudumentary An Inconvenient Truth, climate alarmism started its own offensive against the US on the American soil. This offensive has been going surprisingly successfully, and led to the current situation.

The recent Attorneys General gambit is a show of desperation, rather than strength. Greenpeace, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and whoever else behind them have sacrificed three state Attorneys General – Eric Schneiderman, Maura Healey, and Kamala Harris – as if they were merely pawns. Maybe they were. Those who press an analogy between the energy companies and the tobacco companies just expose themselves as either hopelessly crazy or craftily malicious. Those who act on that analogy are either criminals or enemy agents. Tobacco is a harmful, addictive, and useless (for everybody but the smokers) product. This is why the unconstitutional and corrupt prosecution of the tobacco companies was successful twenty years ago. Oil, gas, and coal are exactly opposite to tobacco. They are energy sources necessary for the existence of civilized society, on which the lives of the majority of Americans depend. And not everybody in this country is an idiot, thinking that the power of his or her dreams can replace electricity and gasoline.By the way, the climate alarmist lobby opposes nuclear power and hydro power as fiercely as it opposes fossil fuels.

Climate alarmism’s Tower of Babel is falling. It is voluntarily supported by the Obama regime from inside, and by the Guardian from outside. The Guardian used to be a respectable newspaper of the British Left, but dropped to the tabloid level and is awaiting indictment for espionage. Other supporters of climatism are in it only for the money, or because they are chained to it as galley slaves to their oars, or because they are too stupid to run away from the falling tower.